In which I learn a new word.

Today I learned the word flâneur, which is something I have been for a couple of years now. But don't tell my countrymen, because I'll be accused of elitism. And Francophilia. (Come to think of it, since becoming a flâneur, I have slept with women with unshaven armpits, consumed lots of wine, seen "De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté," and capitulated to Germans. Coincidence? I think not).

The flâneur is one who strolls -- specifically, someone who walks around the urban landscape drinking in its sights, sounds, smells, and complexities. A gawker at the carnival of city life.

I would like to find a way to work "flâneur" into the conversation, but that would mean having a conversation with people who used words like flâneur, and I don't think I'm up for that.

In which I downgrade my diet.

Some time ago I stopped eating at Burger King -- not for the obvious reason (I have much better food options) but for altruistic reasons. Burger King was hosing the tomato pickers for over what was chump-change for BK, but an important organized labor success for the tomato pickers of Florida. It was the "penny a pound" deal that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers struck with the big tomato-growers consortium in Florida. Most of the big tomato buyers like McDonald's were on board with it -- but BK sabotaged the deal. So I stopped eating at BK, even though there's one a block from my office and sometimes a nice cheap BK Broiler was just the thing when I was hungry and suffering from a cash-flow problem. OK, the food wasn't great, but that's not the point of fast food -- the point is that the food is cheap, and the exact same, every time, so you know precisely what you're going to get no matter where you are.

Anyhow it's tomato season in Maryland now, and I am going to buy a bushel and teach my city-slicker wife how to can them. I had to go into the office and work today but we went to the Farmer's Market first to arrange for delivery of a bushel of tomatoes next week. (And to buy a week's worth of fresh produce... I love the Farmer's Market.) Once I got into the office, I checked out the CIW website and discovered two things:

(a) Burger King caved, but
(b) Chipotle is the new target of CIW tomato-picking wrath.

The thing is, I like Chipotle a lot more than BK. I could go the rest of my life without eating at another Burger King, but sometimes you are stuck somewhere in the suburbs where it's nothing but chain restaurants, and a big fat 1,000 calories Chipotle chicken-and-black-bean burrito is hands-down your best choice. And while you know the food is not particularly good for you (at least they are up front about that), the Chipotleans spout a very convincing line about "food with integrity." Eating at Chipotle allowed you to suck down fast food and feel self-righteous at the same time. Even though McDonald's used to own them.

But Chipotle won't abide by the fair labor practices rules that the CIW is trying to establish. (In a nutshell, the CIW negotiates a deal with the buyer, who agrees to pay an extra penny a pound, which the grower agrees to pass on directly to the pickers.) Plus, on the CIW website there's a picture of a cute girl waving a protest sign ("There's no integrity in slave wages!") outside the Chipotle headquarters in Denver. I went to the Chipotle site to see their side of the story but... they don't have one. Actually, what they did was pretty shitty: they said "What? Poor labor conditions for tomato pickers in Florida? Oh, we can't have that. We won't buy any more tomatoes from Florida." And moved their contracts elsewhere, where there is no CIW negotiating higher rates or better conditions. (Apparently bigger companies can't do this as easily, because they need a lot more tomatoes).

(Aside: slave wages? Really? I though, by definition, slaves didn't get wages.)

Oh, and in researching all this, I came across an article on the subject in The Nation. Let me just say here that I want to track down some of the people who left comments on the Nation article, and kick them in the face. I thought I was a self-righteous douchebag, but some of these people really take the cake. Lots of people saying things like "of course I've never eaten there, because it is a national chain and therefor by definition the embodiment of evil, but shame on them!" They're like the people who sniffly assert that they don't even own a television and they are, therefore, far, far superior to the millions of people who do, and at any rate, all television sucks, so therefore, they don't own one.

Here's something that really made me want to launch a smackdown: "well, after checking the menu, it seems to be "mexican" food only a gringo could love. do yourselves a favour and visit a local mamá y papá restaurante and have some real food!" Fuck you, you fucking self-righteous prick. First off, the fact that a restaurant is owned by someone with brown skin and accented English does not make its food automatically better. I have eaten in some really vile Mexican restaurants owned by actual Mexicans. Second, there are vast swaths of this country where there is no "mamá y papá restaurante," and third, your use of the Spanish just makes me want to punch your fucking smug teeth down your fucking smug throat that much more. Fourth, it's not Mexican food, it's tex-mex, and fifth, don't call me a gringo, and I won't call you a fatuous queef. Sixth, don't fucking tell me where to eat.

Despite the fact that I don't want to be like the unctuous little self-parodying leftist assholes on the Nation's comments section, I probably wll stop eating at Chipotle for awhile. Because the CIW has a cute girl with a sign, and Chipotle Inc. just has hypocrisy. Luckily, I don't go to the suburbs that often anymore. And there's usually a Qdoba or Baja Fresh around if I'm really jonesing for fast-food tex-mex. (I know, they're probably not any more ethical than Chipotle -- maybe even less so -- but I'm trying not to look too closely, here.)

In which I do not delight you with my musical aesthetic

I signed onto blogger today with the notion of adding to the layout of this, my blog. The plan was to attached a link to my Muxtape page, which would thus allow you, my loyal reader, to actually hear some of the fairly obscure music about which I write from time to time.

You would be so smitten that you would instantly click on the Muxtape links and purchase the music. Yes, that was the plan, except that the Recording Industry Association of America has forced Muxtape to shut down.

This is emblematic of the problems plaguing the recording industry. It is so blatantly inimical to the best interests of the members of the RIAA that one has to wonder whether the RIAA has been taken over by a band of psychotic groundhogs. Because certainly no human being with even the faintest trace of business acumen would do something so colossally stupid.

Here's how Muxtape worked: you could open an account and upload up to 12 songs in MP3 format. Anyone could go to your page and hear your virtual mix tape. You could also surf it and hear other people's virtual mix tapes. There was no way (to my knowledge, at least) to download and keep the songs that were up there; you could just click and listen, one mix at a time.

If you liked a song, you could click on it and it would take you to Amazon or some other music retailer so you could buy the mp3 yourself, or find more stuff by that artist, etc. When I first used it I was tickled by what an easy, effective marketing tool it was for lesser-known artists. It was a great way to hear music that other people liked, and get into new artists you wouldn't otherwise hear.

The RIAA website says that the organization's mission "is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality." A service like Muxtape seems to be so good at accomplishing those two things that if it didn't exist, the RIAA should see to it that such a thing was invented. It "supports and promotes. . . creative . . . vitality" by ensuring that lesser known artists and music gets a much wider distribution than through the tottering corpse that is mainstream radio, without costing the labels a dime. The people who bought the music actually promote it for them! At the same time, it "supports and promotes . . . financial vitality" of record labels by funneling new listeners to places they can legally purchase the music.

So how does shutting down Muxtape help the artists, the labels, the music lovers, or the music retailers? Seriously. Anyone? Anyone at all? Am I missing something here?

Whenever recording industry executives whine about sales being down... it's not because of piracy. It's because of decisions like this which are just inexplicably stupidy. Suicidal, even. Is there any chance that the short-sighted, mentally fossilized nincompoops who destroyed the American automotive industry got jobs running record companies?

In which I wonder where to begin

I'd prefer to leave politics out of this blog... but they seem to be the only fly in the ointment these days. I believe that people get worked up over little things because they don't have big things to worry about, and so perhaps it's the truly astounding, almost embarrassing level of domestic tranquility that's making me get so worked up over political things these days...

But then again, maybe it's the notion that my son will have to live in the world we're making today.

I try to be sanguine. Hatred and stupidity and fear were not invented in 1982, after all. There were ignorant and small-minded people voting and electing their own kind then, as now. But I find it increasingly hard to laugh off the public idiocy of others these days.

There are certainly people with whom I can respectfully disagree. That's not the issue. Reasonable minds can differ on questions like, what's the best way for people to have access to health care, and what's the best policy for ensuring a well-educated populace, and how to maximize economic prosperity. (Of course, I'm right, and they're wrong, but nonetheless, it's not an unreasonable sort of wrong...)

But people say it's OK for the police to spy on political dissidents and for the president to place himself above the law. What do you say to someone like that? You can't have a rational discussion with those people; you need to send them back to the third grade and have them relearn everything they were supposed to learn about civics, social studies, history, and political science.

People say that they won't vote for a black man because he's black, that money spent on urban schools is wasted because "they" can't learn, that cities should be allowed to burn because they are full of "animals." They use the term "illegals" as a euphemism for "Hispanic" and feel obligated to place weapons in their vehicles if, by chance, they have to drive into an unfamiliar part of their area where they might (gasp!) see someone who doesn't look like them. And, in the interest of equal injustice -- what do you have to do to a child so that by the time he's in the 5th grade, any classmate who does well in school is "acting white"? How do I consider myself as a part of the same body politic as people like that? What is our common frame of reference, from which we can compromise and reach practical solutions to problems we both face? I'm not sure that any amount of education can fix that. I think for something like that you need those shock collars that they put on dogs to keep them from running out into the streets. (And chemical castration -- 327 generations of idiots is enough.)

There is the notion that dissent is treason; that we must surrender freedom for security; that to question war is to disparage soldiers; that those who do not do our bidding are our enemies; that it is better to die in a losing battle to maintain the status quo than it is to accept and manage change. That all science is suspect and unreliable. That everything can be expressed in terms of dollars. That we do not need to think about the consequences of our lifestyles, multiplied by 6.7 billion, on one another and on the planet. What message does any responsible politician use to get people like that to support intelligent governance?

I have been reading lately about the Marquis de Condorcet, a Frenchman who lived in the late 18th century and who was Girondist during the French Revolution. He was a well-regarded mathematician outside of his interest in politics, and his writings on societal reform. He also believed in universal education, and -- very rare for his times -- the same education for men and women. This was a man who was very deeply concerned (for obvious reasons) about making the transition from a monarchy to a republican (small r) form of government. He believed that an education should not be simply literacy and mathematics, but should include a lot of both the hard and social sciences, reason, logic, and ethics. (He was also famously opposed to the Jesuit education system that dominated France, and that was indeed the source of his own education).

Condorcet felt that it took an education to transform someone from a subject to a citizen -- from someone who acts according to belief to someone who acts according to reason.

I look around me and I read the newspapers and I wonder where all of these subjects came from. And I fear what happens when you give uneducated, unprepared, unreasoning "subjects" the powers of citizens -- from Condorcet's example. He was imprisoned during the Terror and died in his cell, either from poison or murder.